The NFL often makes changes to the rules in order to improve player safety and this offseason was no different. Owners voted to ban the hip-drop tackle, which is a tackling technique that has led to countless injuries to the lower bodies of offensive players.
Players can be flagged for such illegal tackles, and even if they aren’t penalized during a game, they can receive a fine afterwards after the league reviews any potential violations.
Sean McVay is on the competition committee and he’s fully on board with banning the hip-drop tackle. He shared his thoughts on the change Thursday when asked how comfortable he is with the new rule.
“Oh, I’m comfortable. Being involved in a lot of the conversations, I think the intent is to remove a tackle that leads to a more significant amount of injuries,” McVay said. “You can see, it’s when you are stopping a guy’s momentum, you’re unweighting on the back of his legs. Those are obvious. Now, there are certain positions that defensive players get in where it’s [the] last line of defense and you’re trying to be able to get a guy down by all means. Those aren’t the ones that they want to officiate. You can see if we all just watched it and you said ‘OK, is this the type of tackle that we want in our game?’ Those are the ones that they’re going to officiate to try to get out because there’s a significant uptick in injuries on those types of tackles when the league studied it. There’s a reason why it was 32-0 in terms of the voting when we were at the league meetings on that.”
While this seems like a drastic change, the league will likely look for more egregious examples of dangerous hip-drop tackles when choosing to penalize or fine defenders rather than throwing flags for every minor infraction of the rule.
We’ll get a better idea of how strict officials will be once the season starts but McVay doesn’t sound too concerned about how it’ll impact games.